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  3. The Global Middle East

The Global Middle East is a new book series established by Cambridge University Press that seeks to broaden and deconstruct the geographical boundaries of the 'Middle East' as a concept to include North Africa, Central and South Asia, as well as diaspora communities in Western Europe and North America. The series will feature fresh scholarship that employs theoretically rigorous and innovative methodological frameworks resonating across relevant disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In particular, the general editors welcome approaches that focus on mobility, the erosion of nation-state structures, travelling ideas and theories, transcendental techno-politics, the decentralization of grand narratives, and the dislocation of ideologies inspired by popular movements. The series will also consider translations of works by authors in these regions whose ideas are salient to global scholarly trends but have yet to be introduced to the Anglophone academy.

  • General Editors: Ali Mirsepassi, New York University, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, University of London
  • Advisory Boards: Madawi Al-Rasheed, King's College London, Faisal Devji, University of Oxford, John Hobson, University of Sheffield, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania, Zachary Lockman, New York University, David Ryan, University College Cork

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31 results in The Global Middle East

Page 1 of 2

The Intellectual Thought of Al-Ghazālī
  • Ali Mirsepassi, Tadd Graham Fernée
  • Published online:
    16 January 2025
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024
  • Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) was one of the most influential philosophers of the classical Islamic period, with his intellectual innovations spanning the fields of theology, logic, and law. Despite this, contemporary assessments of Ghazālī often present him as hostile to rationality, and a guardian of dogma and orthodoxy. This study provides an innovative reassessment of Ghazālī's legacy, offering a compelling depiction of a reformer in his own time with increasing relevance to the issues gripping multicultural and globalized societies today. Ali Mirsepassi and Tadd Graham Fernée closely study Ghazālī's major Persian-language text Kīmīyā-e saʿādat (The Alchemy of Happiness) and its scholarly reception, alongside his lesser-read works, arguing that Ghazālī shared a message of reform, and critique of Abbasid institutions. Ghazālī's critical stance is revealed as both pragmatic and cosmopolitan in its recognition of autonomy from religion in many aspects of life, and in the value placed upon scientific contribution.

Civic Death in Contemporary Turkey
  • Mass Surveillance and the Authoritarian State
  • Seçkin Sertdemir
  • Published online:
    09 January 2025
    Print publication:
    23 January 2025
  • What does it mean for a government to declare its citizens 'dead' while they still live? Following the failed 2016 coup, the Turkish AKP government implemented sweeping powers against some 152,000 of its citizens. These Kanun hükmünde kararnameli ('emergency decreed') were dismissed from their positions and banned for life from public service. With their citizenship rights revoked, Seçkin Sertdemir argues these individuals were rendered into a state of 'civic death'. This study considers how these authoritarian securitisation methods took shape, shedding light on the lived experiences of targeted people. Bringing together approaches from political philosophy, social anthropology, and sociology, Sertdemir outlines the approaches and justifications used by the Turkish government to dismiss opponents, increase surveillance, and brand citizens as 'terrorists'. At the same time, extensive archival research and in-depth interviews bring focus to the impact of these measures on the lives of women, and the disabled and LGBTQ+ communities.

Millennial Dreams in Oil Economies
  • Job Seeking and the Global Political Economy of Labour in Oman
  • Crystal A. Ennis
  • Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025
  • This book shifts the analysis of economic development in Oman from the traditional focus on oil to the perspective of labour. Focusing on the experiences of workers, jobseekers, and the governance of labour markets, Crystal A. Ennis offers a fresh perspective on regional development and rentier neoliberalism in the Gulf. Highlighting Oman's position within global capitalism, Ennis makes a compelling case for de-exceptionalising the Gulf, arguing that the region's labour markets are global and subject to similar pressures as other global economies. Moving beyond oil also allows Ennis to focus on the social conditions of Oman, where over sixty four percent of the population are under the age of thirty. Ennis offers a rich analysis of historical lineages of labour governance, class formation; and, following protests after 2011 as youth unemployment soared in the region, how authoritarian states react to public pressure and social unrest around perceived economic decline.

Polluted Politics
  • The Development of an Israeli-Palestinian E-Waste Economy
  • John-Michael Davis, Yaakov Garb
  • Published online:
    18 December 2024
    Print publication:
    05 December 2024
  • This book describes the politically charged afterlife of Israeli electronics gathered by and processed in a cluster of rural Palestinian villages that has emerged as an informal regional e-waste hub. As with many such hubs throughout the global South, rudimentary recycling practices represent a remarkable entrepreneurial means of livelihood amidst poverty and constraint, that generates staggering damage to local health and the environment, with tensions between these reaching a breaking point. John-Michael Davis and Yaakov Garb draw on a decade of community-based action research with and within these villages to contextualise the emergence, realities and future options of the Palestinian hub within both the geo-political realities of Israel's occupation of the West Bank as well as shifting understandings of e-waste and recycling dynamics and policies globally. Their stories and analysis are a poignant window into this troubled region and a key sustainability challenge in polarized globalized world.

Mandatory Madness
  • Colonial Psychiatry and Mental Illness in British Mandate Palestine
  • Chris Sandal-Wilson
  • Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • Mandatory Madness offers a new perspective on a pivotal period in the history of modern Palestine, by putting mental illness and the psychiatric encounters it engendered at the heart of the story. Through a careful and creative reading of an eclectic mix of archival and published material, Mandatory Madness reveals how a range of actors - British colonial officials, Zionist health workers, Arab doctors and nurses, and Palestinian families - responded to mental illness in the decades before 1948. Rather than a concern of European Jewish psychiatric experts alone, questions around the causes, nature, and treatment of mental illness were negotiated across diverse and sometimes surprising sites in mandate Palestine: not only in underfunded and overcrowded government mental hospitals and private Jewish clinics, certainly, but also in family homes and neighbourhood streets, in colonial courtrooms and prisons and census offices, and in the itineraries of shaykhs and patients alike as they crossed newly drawn borders within the Levant. Bringing together histories of medicine, colonialism, and the modern Middle East, Mandatory Madness highlights how the seemingly personal and private matter of mental illness generated distinctive forms of entanglement: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region.

The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran
  • Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production
  • Katrin Nahidi
  • Published online:
    07 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Modernist Iranian art represents a highly diverse field of cultural production deeply involved in discussing questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. This book investigates how artistic production and art criticism reflected upon the discourse about gharbzadegi (westoxification), the most substantial critique of Iran's adaptation of Western modernity, and ultimately proved to be a laboratory for the negotiation of an anti-colonial concept of an Iranian artistic modernity, which artists and critics envisioned as a significant other to Western colonial modernity. In this book, Katrin Nahidi revisits Iranian modernist art, aiming to explore a political and contextualized interpretation of modernism. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Nahidi provides a history of modernist art production since the 1950s and reveals the complex political agency underlying art historiographical processes. Offering a key contribution to postcolonial art history, Nahidi shows how Iranian artistic modernity was used to flesh out anti-colonial concepts and ideas around Iranian national identity.

Heroes to Hostages
  • America and Iran, 1800–1988
  • Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
  • Published online:
    03 August 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • It is easy to forget, given the oppositional dynamic between Iran and the United States of the last 50 years, that these two countries once shared productive partnership. Tracing US-Iran relations over two turbulent centuries, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet considers when and how this relationship went awry. With careful attention to social and cultural as well as diplomatic developments, Kashani-Sabet shows that the rift did not originate in flashpoints of crisis, like the 1953 coup or the 1979 Islamic Revolution, but was instead long in the making. Drawing from a wealth of English and Persian-language sources, many of which were previously unavailable or unacknowledged, this book considers the relationship from the vantage point of Iranian society and the experiences of an evolving Iran that strived to accommodate American and great power politics. Following these two nations through wars, decolonization, and revolution, Kashani-Sabet presents an invaluable history of a diplomatic rivalry that informs geopolitics to this day.

An Iranian Childhood
  • Rethinking History and Memory
  • Hamid Dabashi
  • Published online:
    13 April 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • Hamid Dabashi was born and raised in southern Iran in the 1950s and 1960s. During this time, his homeland was changed beyond recognition, from the 1953 coup d'état to the 1963 political protests and the beginning of the Marxist rebellions against the Shah in 1971. In this vibrant, unique and personal study, Dabashi recounts his experience of this defining period in modern Iranian history, deftly blending the personal with the political, the ordinary with the extraordinary. Lyrically written, he combines vivid childhood memories with careful reflection to explore the intersection of history and memory. The book draws upon a rich tapestry of themes and sources, including art, literature, and folklore. In doing so, Dabashi asserts the power and place of the knowing postcolonial subject. Redrawing the limits of modern literary historiography, he asks what it means to be a Muslim and an Iranian, and, indeed, what it is that forms the humanity of a person.

The Making of Persianate Modernity
  • Language and Literary History between Iran and India
  • Alexander Jabbari
  • Published online:
    23 March 2023
    Print publication:
    30 March 2023
  • From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.

Schooling the Nation
  • Education and Everyday Politics in Egypt
  • Hania Sobhy
  • Published online:
    16 March 2023
    Print publication:
    23 March 2023
  • Telling the story of the Egyptian uprising through the lens of education, Hania Sobhy explores the everyday realities of citizens in the years before and after the so-called 'Arab Spring'. With vivid narratives from students and staff from Egyptian schools, Sobhy offers novel insights on the years that led to and followed the unrest of 2011. Drawing a holistic portrait of education in Egypt, she reveals the constellations of violence, neglect and marketization that pervaded schools, and shows how young people negotiated the state and national belonging. By approaching schools as key disciplinary and nation-building institutions, this book outlines the various ways in which citizenship was produced, lived, and imagined during those critical years. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Violence and Representation in the Arab Uprisings
  • Benoît Challand
  • Published online:
    02 February 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
  • Providing a longue durée perspective on the Arab uprisings of 2011, Benoît Challand narrates the transformation of citizenship in the Arab Middle East, from a condition of latent citizenship in the colonial and post-independence era to the revolutionary dynamics that stimulated democratic participation. Considering the parallel histories of citizenship in Yemen and Tunisia, Challand develops innovative theories of violence and representation that view cultural representations as calls for a decentralized political order and democratic accountability over the security forces. He argues that a new collective imaginary emerged in 2011 when the people represented itself as the only legitimate power able to decide when violence ought to be used to protect all citizens from corrupt power. Shedding light upon uprisings in Yemen and Tunisia, but also elsewhere in the Middle East, this book offers deeper insights into conceptions of violence, representation, and democracy.

A Social History of Modern Tehran
  • Space, Power, and the City
  • Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi
  • Published online:
    22 December 2022
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • Tehran, the capital of Iran since the late eighteenth century, is now one of the largest cities in the Middle East. Exploring Tehran's development from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, Ashkan Rezvani Naraghi paints a vibrant picture of a city undergoing rapid and dynamic social transformation. Rezvani Naraghi demonstrates that this shift was the product of a developing discourse around spatial knowledge, in which the West became the model for the social practices of the state and sections of Iranian society. As traditional social spaces, such as coffee houses, bathhouses, and mosques, were replaced by European-style cafes, theatres, and sports clubs, Tehran and its people were irreversibly altered. Using an array of archival sources, Rezvani Naraghi stresses the agency of everyday inhabitants in shaping urban change. This enlightening history not only allows us to better understand the contours of contemporary Tehran, but to develop a new way of imagining, talking about, and building 'the city'.

Fixing Stories
  • Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey and Syria
  • Noah Amir Arjomand
  • Published online:
    18 March 2022
    Print publication:
    17 February 2022
  • News 'fixers' are translators and guides who assist foreign journalists. Sometimes key contributors to bold, original reporting and other times key facilitators of homogeneity and groupthink in the news media, they play the difficult but powerful role of broker between worlds, shaping the creation of knowledge from behind the scenes. In Fixing Stories, Noah Amir Arjomand reflects on the nature of news production and cross-cultural mediation. Based on human stories drawn from three years of field research in Turkey, this book unfolds as a series of narratives of fixers' career trajectories during a period when the international media spotlight shone on Turkey and Syria. From the Syrian Civil War, Gezi Park protest movement, rise of authoritarianism in Turkey and of ISIS in Syria, to the rekindling of conflict in both countries' Kurdish regions and Turkey's 2016 coup attempt, Arjomand brings to light vivid personal accounts and insider perspectives on world-shaking events alongside analysis of the role fixers have played in bringing news of Turkey and Syria to international audiences.

Art and the Arab Spring
  • Aesthetics of Revolution and Resistance in Tunisia and Beyond
  • Siobhan Shilton
  • Published online:
    07 July 2021
    Print publication:
    08 July 2021
  • The revolutions that began to sweep across countries in North Africa and the Middle East in December 2010 – like other revolutions in diverse modern historical contexts – have often been articulated, internally and externally, in black and white terms of success or failure, liberation or constraint, for or against, friend or enemy. These internal and external clichés are perpetuated by what Jellel Gasteli has called 'icons of revolutionary exoticism'. Paying particular attention to works from the Tunisian Revolution of 2011, this book examines a diverse body of art including photography, sculpture, graffiti, performance, video and installation by over twenty-five artists. Examining how art can evoke the idea of revolution, Art and the Arab Spring reveals a new way of understanding these revolutions, their profound cultural impact, and of the meaning of the term 'revolution' itself.

Global 1979
  • Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution
  • Edited by Arang Keshavarzian, Ali Mirsepassi
  • Published online:
    01 July 2021
    Print publication:
    15 July 2021
  • The Iranian revolution of 1979 not only had an impact on regional and international affairs, but was made possible by the world and time in which it unfolded. This multi-disciplinary volume presents this revolution within its transnational and global contexts. Moving deftly from the personal to the global and from the provincial to the national, it draws attention to the multiplicity of spaces of the revolution such as streets, schools, prisons, personal lives, and histories such as the Cold War and Global 1960s and 70s. With a broad range of approaches, Global 1979 conceives of the Iranian Revolution not as exceptional or anachronistic, but as an uprising constituted by multiple, interwoven geographies and histories, which disrupt static and bounded notions of the local, national, regional, and global.

Tunisia's Modern Woman
  • Nation-Building and State Feminism in the Global 1960s
  • Amy Aisen Kallander
  • Published online:
    20 May 2021
    Print publication:
    03 June 2021
  • Claims over women's liberation vocalized by Tunisia's first president, Habib Bourguiba began with legal reforms related to family law in 1956. In this book, Amy Aisen Kallander uses this political appropriation of women's rights to look at the importance of women to post-colonial state-building projects in Tunisia and how this relates to other state-feminist projects across the Middle East and during the Cold War. Here we see how the notion of modern womanhood was central to a range of issues from economic development (via family planning) to intellectual life and the growth of Tunisian academia. Looking at political discourse, the women's press, fashion, and ideas about love, the book traces how this concept was reformulated by women through transnational feminist organizing and in the press in ways that proposed alternatives to the dominant constructions of state feminism.

What is Iran?
  • Domestic Politics and International Relations in Five Musical Pieces
  • Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
  • Published online:
    12 March 2021
    Print publication:
    25 February 2021
  • What is Iran? What are its domestic politics? Its history? Its international relations? Here, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam sheds fresh light on these questions, offering a general introduction to everything there is to know about this country. Uniquely, he uses musical pieces as a way to offer a holistic understanding of the full spectrum of Iranian affairs. As a result, even the general reader is invited to traverse a wide array of topics in an interactive format which merges approaches from the social sciences with philosophy, poetry and art. These topics include a variety of themes, issues and personalities: from Trump, Khomeini, the Shah, Saddam Hussein and Qasem Soleimani, to Israel, Syria, Latin America, China and the Gulf monarchies. Ultimately, this book demonstrates in clear and accessible prose the impact of Iranian politics on a global scale, and offers solutions to the various crises enveloping the country in the region and beyond.

Cosmopolitan Radicalism
  • The Visual Politics of Beirut's Global Sixties
  • Zeina Maasri
  • Published online:
    20 July 2020
    Print publication:
    06 August 2020
  • Exploring the intersections of visual culture, design and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, this compelling interdisciplinary study critically examines a global conjuncture in Lebanon's history, marked by anticolonial struggle and complicated by a Cold War order. Against a celebratory reminiscence of the 'golden years', Beirut's long 1960s is conceived of as a liminal juncture, an anxious time and space when the city held out promises at once politically radical and radically cosmopolitan. Zeina Maasri examines the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist pursuits, shedding light on key cultural transformations that saw Beirut develop as a Mediterranean site of tourism and leisure, a nexus between modern art and pan-Arab publishing and, through the rise of the Palestinian Resistance, a node in revolutionary anti-imperialism. Drawing on uncharted archives of printed media this book expands the scope of historical analysis of the postcolonial Arab East.

Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt
  • The Politics of Hegemony
  • Sara Salem
  • Published online:
    10 April 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020
  • This study presents an alternative story of the 2011 Egyptian revolution by revisiting Egypt's moment of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century. Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt explores the country's first postcolonial project, arguing that the enduring afterlives of anticolonial politics, connected to questions of nationalism, military rule, capitalist development and violence, are central to understanding political events in Egypt today. Through an imagined conversation between Antonio Gramsci and Frantz Fanon, two foundational theorists of anti-capitalism and anticolonialism, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt focuses on issues of resistance, revolution, mastery and liberation to show how the Nasserist project, created by Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers in 1952, remains the only instance of hegemony in modern Egyptian history. In suggesting that Nasserism was made possible through local, regional and global anticolonial politics, even as it reproduced colonial ways of governing that continue to reverberate into Egypt's present, this interdisciplinary study thinks through questions of traveling theory, global politics, and resistance and revolution in the postcolonial world.

Temporary Marriage in Iran
  • Gender and Body Politics in Modern Iranian Film and Literature
  • Claudia Yaghoobi
  • Published online:
    13 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 January 2020
  • Proposing a methodology that brings feminist theories of embodiment to bear on the Iranian literary and cinematic tradition, this study examines temporary marriage in Iran, not just as an institution but also as a set of practices, identities and meanings that have transformed over the course of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Based on analysis of novels and short stories from the Pahlavi era, and cinematic works produced after the Islamic Revolution, Claudia Yaghoobi looks at the representation of the sigheh women, or those who entered into temporary marriages. Each work reflects the manner in which the practice of sigheh impacts women by calling into question how sexuality works as a form of political analysis and power, revealing how a sigheh woman's sexual bodily autonomy is used as ammunition against what governments deem inappropriate gendered expression. While focusing mainly on modern Iranian cultural productions, Yaghoobi moves beyond the literary and cinematic realms to offer an in-depth examination of this controversial social institution which has been the subject of disdain for many Iranian feminists and captured the imagination of many Western observers.

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